Philip, I'm sorry if you took my remark as an evaluation of the content of your kindle-ansprache, rather than, as intended, approbation for your strategy for widest distribution. No, as regards the value of your labor, I commend your attention to Tim Kreider's trenchant cri de coeur: Slaves of the Internet, Unite! I would have charged $0.02, as in: "Here's my two cents. Where's yours?" Ninety-nine is fine.
Now, while my motto might as well be "so far left, it all looks right to me," the true centroid of my concerns has become so decidedly woo woo as to obtrude only obliquely into any recognizable political memespace.
My scifi credentials are equivalently thin, but I did have the privilege of chiding Stan Robinson, over kung pao pork, for omitting a fungal inoculation from his otherwise excellent terrarium recipe in 2312. He generously granted me a point, which really belongs to 'Saint' Paul Stamets.
I don't have any argument with anything you say in your essays. I resonate with your intention, and it's expression, but I do think you might be mistaking the froth under your board for the mighty breaker whose coming your essay heralds.
I believe, in the way Dawkins so despises, I believe it is life itself which desires to vault the well of gravity. We monkeys are merely the vector, vying for the honor of heaving ourselves out of our tide pool, and we are, for the most part, just as unaware of the import of our struggle as our gasping piscine forebear.
A tenet of my belief is that our terrible misadventures of agriculture, of industry, of culture itself, the whole nightmare of history, is little more than the story of children, shitting in their sandbox, and now weeping, imagining that's all they're capable of, or else still endlessly coveting some other child's bucket and shovel.
Childhood's end is upon us, to coin a phrase, and all that has deracinated us from savannah, forest and meadow, literally uprooted us from identifying with any particular patch of dirt, is just the backstory of our true destiny: to take our tide pool with us: to master the craft of capturing lightning in a bottle, of sustaining life in a pocket world, and of casting these bottles upon the deep, whose medium is the message: life is coming; we are here.
Long sentences, eh?
So, yeah, you're right to ask: will Eros tip our arrow, or Thanatos? And yeah, you're right to answer: it had better be the forces of light, moist warmth and connection, or else those stripmalls on the Moon will sprawl forlorn 'til the Sun swallows all trace.
But, we won't get there with pop culture references and left liberal exhortations to do politics right for fucking once. The yoga of the spaceborne will decompile everything we know, right back to knapping flint for bone calendar burins. And everything we've learned, and will learn, will come together in a new grammar of husbandry, but without the individual human at the center, of course, or the family, or community or economic collective.
The new sine qua non of human endeavor will be to curate the myriad irreducible sets of DNA, the real boss on this planet, and to marshall the optimum physical and chemical infrastructure to allow that DNA to flourish and evolve elsewhere. Anywhere. Big job, millennia big.
You with me?
Joseph Campbell said that for humanity to move forward, we would have to develop a planetary mythos. The overview effect is the transformative experience that will likely form the basis for this mythos.
Write about that, will you?
